title: Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis.
abstract: The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Marcelo A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Montemurro
authors.forename: Damián H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Zanette
mesh_terms: D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D008373:Manuscripts as Topic; D012660:Semantics